Facts and conclusions.

I am likely to live well into my eighties or nineties.  As long as I keep my weight under control, my health in those years is almost guaranteed to be substantially better than the generation ahead of me.  I don’t see retirement as ever being an option, either financially or psychologically, but what I will actually be doing is a huge open question.  I simply can’t imagine doing the same thing I’m doing now for twenty more years.  I really can’t imagine doing the next thing I’ll be doing for the twenty years after that!

I was born in 1967, in that demilitarized zone between the boomers and Gen X.  But there are days where I feel I have more in common with my millennial children than with my peers, even those only 5 or 10 years ahead of me.  Which means I kind of like the notion of hanging around in my kids’ world for as much or more time as I will have spent in “my own”.  But if I do, how will I stay relevant and how can I make myself valuable to them and their peers, my future employers?  Not just for a next career, but probably for one or two more.  This has to happen if I am to remain a sane working adult for as long as I think I will need to.

I think there are a couple of keys to successfully camping out in the millennial world, and whatever comes after.  The first has to be technological competency.  One of the great miscalculations of my teen life was to look at the developing world of technology (which I thought I was quite suited for at the time) as a niche occupation with an uncertain future.  Okay so I got that one thoroughly, totally, mindbogglingly wrong.  Technical creativity is excellent currency today, and looks to remain so for the foreseeable future.  This is true not only for incoming freshmen (who by all accounts are not going to completely close the gaps) but for anyone with the aptitude who is contemplating relevant, meaningful, and secure employment.

Next time:  Collaboration and distributed development, then creative content generation, and finally a fun way to bring it all together.